Intel is still about two months away from launching its Ivy Bridge CPUs, yet pictures of next year's Intel consumer CPU – codenamed Haswell – has appeared online. The CPU is strutting its stuff alongside Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge and Nehalem for an Intel family photo.

Intel is still about two months away from launching its Ivy Bridge CPUs, yet pictures of next year's Intel consumer CPU – codenamed Haswell – has appeared online. The CPU is strutting its stuff alongside Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge and Nehalem for an Intel family photo.

Thanks to a set of slides that leaked way back in November, we have a good idea of what to expect from Haswell and its accompanying Shark Bay platform. We also mostly know what to expect in terms of graphics improvements over Ivy Bridge, at least architecturally speaking. What is surprising though is that the company has qualification hardware ready a year ahead of the expected launch, something that must be a first even for Intel.

Looking at the chips it's clear that Haswell has a larger die than Ivy Bridge, something that shouldn't come as a surprise as Haswell has a more advanced IGP, something that will physically take up more die space. As both CPUs are made using Intel's 22nm process, Haswell ends up being slightly larger due to the laws of physics.

The CPUs in question here should all be mobile CPUs, hence why there's no heat spreader on top. This allows for a more candid view of the CPU core itself, but it also shows that Intel has changed the placement of the resistors once again and there also appear to be a lot more of them than on previous CPU generations, albeit much smaller resistors are being used. Due to the fact that his is a mobile CPU, we should be looking at either at a BGA part or a socket G3 947-pin part, but it's not clear which one of the two it is. For more details on Haswell we suggest you hit up the links above.